The Trump Tower set-up and other Russian collusion fantasies. You have to be a Leftist to claim that Trump’s son walking away from a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians without promising anyone is collusion, while the fact that federal law enforcement, the DNC, and Hillary’s campaign worked closely with myriad Russians close to Putin to destroy Trump is not collusion.

And if you’re still confused, Thomas Lifson reminds us of the staggering double standard that saw the federal government and the media cover for DiFi’s grotesque carelessness with (and profiting from) the Chinese government, while those same institutions are endlessly trying to destroy Trump because . . . something, something Russians, something something:

The contrast with the treatment received by the Trump campaign when a Russian spy was merely suspected (on the basis of what appear to be ginned-up concerns over Carter Page, an FBI informant) is so stark as to raise serious question as to the integrity of the FBI counterintelligence operation. The NSA’s ability to monitor every form of electronic communications except ham radio [footnote omitted], was mobilized to spy on the presidential campaign of the opposition party to the Obama administration. No notification to the campaign was offered, unlike Feinstein’s treatment.

The entire incident is being presented to the public as no big deal. That is a classic example of the fake news of which President Trump so vocally complains.

Finally, VDH looks at the insane Russianism driving the Left, some of whom have become true believers, and many of whom are cynical operatives trying to protect either their power bases or their ideological hold over American institutions:

Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian collusion in the 2016 election. He was supposed to find proof that Trump campaign officials deliberately collaborated with Russian agents to subvert the election and thereby achieve through foreign subterfuge what they could not secure through votes.

Yet that mandate was jettisoned just weeks after Mueller began, apparently once his lawyers sensed what Peter Strzok (soon to be on his investigatory team) already knew when he had texted Lisa Page, “There’s no big there there” —an impression that both James Comey and James Clapper later shared when they confessed that they had no evidence of Russian collusion.

After a year and a half, Mueller so far has been reduced to indicting some Russians operatives for cyber crimes and a few former Trump officials on charges that have had nothing to do with collusion.

But out of the Mueller conundrum and congressional investigations arose damning information that Obama national-security officials illegally unmasked and leaked to the press the names of those surveilled. In addition, DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled either gullible or partisan FISA court judges to obtain surveillance warrants on American citizens, on the basis of an unverified dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Discredited FBI officials lied to federal investigators. The former FBI director leaked confidential memos written on FBI time on FBI devices, and he probably worked with CIA Director John Brennan (who had previously lied twice under oath to the United States Congress) to monitor the Trump campaign, including but not limited to implanting government informants among Trump employees.

[snip]

In sum, Russian collusion is a 2016 election construct. The hysteria over it serves a palliative for hatred of a presidency that so far cannot be stopped before 2020. Had Hillary Clinton won the election as experts assured the nation she would, there would be no Mueller investigation, either of Trump or of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Now-fired or reassigned FBI grandees like Andrew McCabe or Peter Strzok and DOJ officials such as Bruce Ohr would have thrived. If anything, embracing conflicts of interest and bias to successfully warp an election would be seen as a sacrifice to be rewarded, not culpability to be punished.

The Cold War reminds us that socialism is bad. A new poll came out showing that Democrats adore socialism, which they think is better for people than capitalism. This view, of course, means that they’re looking, not at National Socialism (aka Nazis), or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union), or the completely socialists Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).

Instead, what it means is that they’re looking at that rosy view of Western Europe from the 1960s through the 1990s. Of course, they’re totally missing the fact that Europe, despite its claim that it was “socialist,” wasn’t socialist at all.

What supported Western Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialism was America. We paid for their military costs and accepted their outrageous tariffs, all to help them to recover from WWII and to prevent them from once again falling into an apocalyptic conflagration. Europe may have art and architecture, but the 20th century proved that it had little in the way of actual civilization.

Anyway, if you know a Leftist stupid enough to think socialism is the answer, this video might (maybe, perhaps, just possibly) help you educate that person (h/t Seraphic Secret):

Responding from his official MIT email address, Chomsky wrote, “What I’ve seen of what he does is outrageous, but unlike many civil libertarians here and especially in other countries, I don’t think that the right way to deal with
‘hate speech’ and crazed fabrications is to ban them; rather, to confront them, and to seek and confront the reasons why anyone pays a moment’s attention to them.”

Who knew that the arch-Leftist Chomsky was a fan of the marketplace of ideas and free speech? (And no, I did not miss the fact that he accused “civil libertarians” of advocating censorship. I have no idea what he’s talking about, since the essence of libertarianism is that we don’t bring the government’s heavy hand down on things.)

Today, though, while keeping my Bookworm company, I read language that struck me not just as below average but as wrong. Really wrong.

You guys are my reality checkers. Does the language I’ve highlighted in the following passage from the course’s section on religious diversity constitute important information, random information, or the unnecessary insertion of a classic antisemitic trope?

The so-called “Black Church” (churches comprised primarily of African Americans) has contributed significantly not only to the religious and cultural richness of the United States, but it has also played a central role in the political sphere. Numerous black religious leaders, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., have been and continue to be hugely important in numerous civil rights and public policy causes. Meanwhile, Jewish Americans have had significant influence on the United States’ policies in the Middle East, and millions of other religious and nonreligious Americans influence politics and public policy every day in elective office, through participation in the political process and through civic activities in their neighborhoods and communities.

Here’s my take: Jews make up only 2% of the American population. To the extent there used to be unanimous support for Israel across both political parties, that wasn’t driven by this 2%. Instead, it came from (a) anticommunism during the Cold War, because Israel sided with America against the Soviet Union, which backed the Arab states; (b) respect for a beleaguered liberal democracy in a sea of totalitarian theocracies and thugocracies; and (c) an American prophetic Christian belief that Israel is the Jewish land and Jews need to return to that land to initiate the Second Coming. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that America’s conservative Christian community currently loves Israel more and fears Islam more than America’s predominantly Progressive Jewish community does.

My view is that ti’s antisemites, such as Walt and Mearsheimer, who argue that a cabal of evil Jews is directing America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy. For BYU to slip in what I see as a gratuitous remark about Jewish control over foreign policy is a bow to the antisemitic world of Walt and Mearsheimer, and all the others who trail in their wake.

What’s your take? Again, a reality check is always welcome. I’m willing to concede that I’m hypersensitive, but it seems to me that BYU is either careless or worse.

UPDATE: I’m getting a lot of different and interesting opinions — thank you! I should say here something that I should have said in the first place: I have no hostility to Mormons, a group of people I greatly respect. While their faith doesn’t attract me, they live honorable and patriotic lives and that’s always going to appeal to me.

I am, however, deeply suspicious of academics. After all, we know that academia trumps values. That’s why Jesuit colleges encourage abortion and Brandeis supports antisemitic academics. One of the hardest Left students I knew in law school was a BYU grad (he’d followed a girl there). Thus, even though BYU is mostly Mormon and in Utah, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything when measured against the fact that it’s an American university.

My main problem was that the statement seemed utterly out of place. One can definitely praise (or damn) Jews for their impact on American culture (movies, songs, television), but their control over America’s foreign policy strikes me as less obvious. Random statements always seem a bit suspicious.

Incidentally, in the spirit of equality, let me point you to an article in the Forward, a hard Left Jewish online magazine, saying that the NRA is antisemitic. The article basically says that Wayne LaPierre gave a speech attacking Leftists for undermining traditional American institutions.

To the article’s author, the speech’s topic, in and of itself, is an antisemitic dog whistle. I strongly disagree. Leftists of all races, nations of origin, and faiths are proudly attacking America’s institutions — they hate capitalism and the free market, they hate the Second Amendment and other constitutional rights, and they use American institutions (Hollywood, the media, academia, etc.) to spread that hate. In other words, they’re Marxists and they hate what America stands for. That’s not a Jewish thing; that’s a Marxist thing.

Ironically, Marxists throughout the 20th and into the 21st century have been fanatically antisemitic, ever since Marx, a self-hating first generation Jewish convert tied together Jews and capitalism. That’s why socialist nations such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia aggressively slaughtered Jews. And that’s why the harder Left a college campus is, the more likely it is to support the BDS movement and otherwise be hostile to Jews. So, no, there is no dog whistle there.

The article also points out that LaPierre singled out Jews in his speech: Soros, Schumer, and Steyer, among others. Yes, they’re all genetically Jewish, and Schumer and Steyer associate themselves with the Jewish community. First and foremost they’re all hardcore Leftists.

Soros is dismissive of his Jewish past, Schumer is the leader of the Senate Democrats, and Steyer has noisily devoted himself to advocating Leftist causes. That is, yes, they are Jewish, but their malevolence towards American institutions is unrelated to being Jews (and certainly none of them are truly religious).

The people LaPierre names are what Evan Sayet calls “plopping” Jews — they plopped out of a Jewish woman’s body and either abandoned Judaism entirely or opted for Reform Judaism, which is more of a social thing, with a form of worship indistinguishable from an amalgam of hard-Left Unitarianism and the Democrat Party platform. I suspect that were LaPierre to speak of Bibi Netanyahu, he’d have nice things to say.

I believe evil exists, but I fear I’ll miss it when it’s present or, worse, find evil where none exists. How do you define evil to avoid such mistakes?

I was listening to Dennis Prager this morning (something I can do now that I signed up for Pragertopia, which has a “first month for $0.99” sale), when Dennis touched upon “evil.” Sitting here now, I can’t really remember the context, but think I recall him saying “The Left doesn’t believe that evil exists.” Prager then said that it does exist, and cited to such familiar examples as the Nazis and Stalin. Another clear example of evil, if I were asked, would be Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. As is so often the case with Dennis’s monologues, I kept running through the issues he raised long after the show had ended.

Because I grew up in San Francisco public schools, went to UC Berkeley, and lived in my parents’ world, which was made up almost entirely of upper-class Democrat-voting Jews (academics, mostly), the mindset in my world was that “evil” was an antiquated notion. People had bad ideas. They were raised wrong. They were victims of ills that could be labeled such as psychopathy, narcissism or schizophrenia. Once labeled as psychological or glandular, you could no longer label the perpetrator as evil. He was merely acting out the chemistry of his brain or the damage of his upbringing.

This meant that, while the Communists did horrible things, one could not blame someone brought up in the milieu who didn’t know anything different. (For the Jews in my world, the exception to this modern thinking was the Nazis. The Nazis were evil — but Stalin and Mao were not; they were just bad.)

Perhaps because of the Nazi exception to the general rule around me, I still believed in evil. I certainly understood that the Nazis were evil. I also understood that part of what made them evil was that they raised up a generation of children who believed that the ultimate evil, namely genocide, was an appropriate act. In the same way, part of what makes fundamentalist Islam so evil is that it destroys the children under its care by turning them into genocidal maniacs. That the children started out innocent is eventually irrelevant. Once they have become soldiers in evil’s army, they must be destroyed.

What scares me about labeling things as “evil,” though, is how easy it is to err. Certainly the Nazis erred when they labeled Jews as evil, something the Islamists still do. I think the Left errs badly when it hysterically shrills that Trump and those who support him are evil. Considering that Trumpian norms are American norms from just over a decade ago, I fail to see any rational basis for this.

The real problem for me is knowing that I erred badly in my life in identifying evil where none existed. My mother and her sister had a fraught relationship. Naturally, I saw things through my mother’s eyes, something helped along by the fact that my aunt was no saint. But what I didn’t realize was that my mother wasn’t either. [Read more…]

The craven FBI refuses to stop Leftist insanity. Although the mainstream media is silent, the conservative media is appropriately outraged that James Comey had already decided in April or May of 2016, in the very early stages of the investigation into Hillary’s national security violations, to clear her of wrongdoing. That is, his decision came about far in advance of the evidence — and nobody in the FBI called him on it.

I’m disgusted but not surprised that the FBI’s employees would do nothing about their head’s manifest violation of his duty to Americans. You see, I already predicted this outcome in early April 2016:

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Was Jim Crow a cruel but necessary reality? David P. Goldman couldn’t writing something boring if he tried. His most recent post riffs off the fact that the North allowed the South the illusion of victory for almost 100 years after the Civil War. According to Goldman, this was an unpleasant necessity required to protect America against foreign threats and analogizes it to the West’s necessary decision to absorb former Nazis to protect against the Communist threat.

I’m not familiar enough with America’s foreign policy in the years between the Civil War and WWI to judge critically what Goldman wrote, but it’s an interesting argument. Certainly America needed its Southern fighters in WWI and WWII. Indeed, we still need them today.

Some Leftist Jews are catching on to the Left’s antisemitism. Lately, I’ve been totally obnoxious on Facebook. Every time my Facebook friends goes off about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and antisemitism, I’ve stated in bold language that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve completely ignored the fact that, for well over a decade now, I’ve made them aware of the vile, pervasive, normalized antisemitism in the Democrat party and, especially, on American campuses.

Thankfully, a few Leftist Jews are figuring out that their Leftist cohorts are not feeling the love. At Forward, a Leftist Jewish publication, Benyamin Moalem says what I’ve said forever, which is that antisemitism (and racism) on the right consists of a few bottom feeders, while antisemitism on the Left is large, mainstream, and very dangerous. After discussing Roger Waters (who revels in antisemitic imagery the Nazis would have loved) and the aggressive antisemitism on campuses, Moalem has this to say: [Read more…]

Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit. The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win it over with a warm war. By targeting Western (that is, capitalist) nations as the evildoers in the world’s imminent boiling destruction, and then playing on the fear, guilt and ignorance of those same Western nations, the Communists . . . er, global warming saviors . . . announced a solution: the West should give up its wealth by transferring it en masse to poor nations. The West should also give up its lifestyle, by abandoning electricity, gas and even toilet paper. The West, in other words, should give true meaning to global warming by engaging in self-immolation.

The last month, though, has seen this Communist-inspired house of cards collapse as quickly as the Soviet bloc did back in 1989. First came ClimateGate, which revealed to the whole world the fact that the most ardent climate “scientists” were, in fact, ideologues who cared little about science, and a great deal about achieving a political goal. They lied about their data, destroyed their facts, and systematically set out to muzzle and destroy anyone who disagreed with them.

Second came word from Russia that the same “scientists” (and please understand that these “scientists” are responsible for almost all of the conclusions on which the hysteria was based) cherry-picked climate data from Russia. This is no small thing. Russia covers 12% of the earth, and it’s been the Siberian tree rings that have been at the centerpiece of the warmies’ claims.

And today comes news that definitively rips the mask off of this whole thing. When Hugo Chavez, a man who seeks to turn his beleaguered nation into a Communist worker’s paradise, with himself as leader for life, announces in Copenhagen that capitalism is the real culprit, and is met, not with silence or boos, but with deafening cheers, everything becomes clear:

President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ – “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Let me translate Chavez’s speech: “The capitalist pigs in the United States are the enemies of the people and need to be destroyed.” Chavez’s speech, in other words, is pitch-perfect Communist Cold War rhetoric. During the Cold War, non-Communist bloc nations would have been politely silent, even if they agreed with his sentiments. Thanks to the brainwashing of global warming, however, people no longer feel compelled to hide their hatred for America and their desire for its destruction.

If Barack Obama had anything approaching human decency, he would use this Chavez speech — and, more importantly, the reaction to this Chavez speech — as the justification for refusing to go to Copenhagen. He won’t though. Obama has made it clear, time and time again, that he agrees with the Chavez speech. He too believes that America is the cause of the world’s woes. He too believes that America should be de-energized and debased, both because it would make the world a better place and because America deserves that kind of humiliation. Chavez’s speech, rather than being the straw that should break the Obami back on climate change, is simply the spoken expression of of their innate beliefs.

Incidentally, I realize that I erred somewhat when I compared what’s happening now to 1989. The difference between now and then is the media. Although the media always hewed left, and was steadily dragging Americans into the relativist world of “Communism is just another way of life,” it was still able to recognize the shattering drama of the Solidarity movement and the physical destruction of the Berlin Wall. These were visible symbols of a decades-long conflict, and their occurrence made for good TV.

Things are entirely different here and now. The media, with almost no exceptions, had bought wholesale into the religion of Climate Change. Media members don’t want to see their God fail. Additionally, there’s no good TV here. Instead of hundreds, and then thousands, of Polish dockworkers facing down Soviet guns, or brave people climbing a wall, again to the backdrop of loaded guns, here are have somewhat complex scientific discussions, a few disgraced academics, and Hugo Chavez (a man media people find charismatic). They don’t want the American people to see or know anything about all of this and, because it lacks good visuals, it’s easy to hide. There’s a revolution taking place, and the media is doing its damndest to bury it.

So folks, it’s up to us here, the ones in the blogosphere, to get word of the revolution out. Bloggers need to write, readers need to email blog posts and news articles to their less news obsessive friends. All of us need to put intriguing notes on facebook, linking to articles that will enlighten a population kept in the dark. We need to write letters to our local editors chastising them (politely, of course), for missing out on the biggest story, so far, of the 21st Century — bigger even than the election of a vaguely black, completely red, man into the White House. The one thing I suggest is that you don’t use the “I told you so” approach. People tend not to respond well to that kind of thing. It’s much better, in terms of piquing people’s interest, to strike a tone of incredulous amazement, or excited sense of discovery, or even vague sadness.

There’s a revolution happening here. We have the weapons to destroy the Communist movement’s second attempt to destroy the Western world. Don’t sit on the sidelines. Do something!

There is a lot of talk about whether, looking ahead to the 2010 elections, we’re looking at 1980, or 1994, or 1932 or some other American political year that I can’t even think of right now. I actually think we’re looking at a different year altogether: 1989. As you may recall, 1989 was a big year. While Obama can’t be bothered to get his sorry self over to Berlin, that was the year the Berlin Wall fell. That was the year the former Soviet Union imploded. That was the end of the 70+ year long European Communist experiment. It was a big deal.

What made 1989 a really big deal was that nobody in the establishment saw it coming. As far as the realpolitik types were concerned (and the liberals, and the media), Communism was a rock solid, all-powerful entity. In their world view, we were going to be in a perpetual stalemate with our Cold War enemy, because we were all equally weak and equally strong. On college campuses we were also told that the European Communists really weren’t all that bad and, Rodney King-like, we should just all learn to get along.

Except that this controlling paradigm was anything but true. European Communism was rotten to the core. Its people were prisoners, but the prison walls were beginning to collapse under their own weight. The government managed economies were completely unsustainable. This internal rot mean that the external pressure the Ronald Reagan placed on those inefficient, dysfunctional economies, coupled with his relentless cheerleading for freedom, brought the whole festering edifice crumbling down.

What was so amazing about the crumble was the speed with which it happened. If any of us had thought about it, we would have said that European Communism would slowly diminish over the years and the decades. None of us envisioned the almost instantaneous collapse that occurred. We oldsters remember that magic moment when the Berlin Wall, an overwhelming physical symbol of the Cold War, simply vanished. Gone.

Up until about August 2009, conventional wisdom was that the liberal juggernaut was unstoppable. Under the guidance of the God-like Obama, progressive liberalism was a rock solid, all-powerful entity. Charles Krauthammer argues that Tuesday put the lie to that fairy tale:

In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics — most prominently, rising minorities and the young — would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia — presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ’08 for the first time in 44 years — went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 — a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.

Ah,” say the skeptics (and Nancy Pelosi). “You’re just looking at two elections. That means nothing.” Well, that may be true. Except that Riehl World notes that Democratic politicians in more conservative communities are abandoning the sinking liberal ship. And they’re not slowly abandoning it but, instead, are swiftly heading for the life boats in en masse departures:

Seven Simpson County officials have switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

I don’t track elections the way more savvy political observers do. But I know a trend and can recognize a historic pattern when I see one — and I’m betting that 2009 is going to be the Democratic equivalent of 1989 for the European Communists. Not only is the Party over, but it’s going to crater with mind-boggling speed.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, of course. Even a damaged party, and a badly damaged party at that, can inflict plenty of wounds on the American economy. Worse, with Obama in the driver’s seat for at least another three years, we can expect our foreign policy and our national security to continue to swing wildly into danger zones. With or without Congress and the American people at his back, a hubristic Barack Obama is going to continue his bizarre foreign policy of bowing to dictators, offending friends, and turning his back on the hard work of keeping safe both Americans at home and American troops abroad.

UPDATE: I’m not the only one who sees lessons in 1989. Bruce Kesler also thinks it’s an important year for us to look back upon and learn from, with the Berlin Wall as the lesson’s centerpiece.

Speaking of Africa, when are we going to wean the dark continent? Are we ever going to get over this nutty notion that we have an obligation to keep pumping money down that particular sewer? It’s bad enough that George Bush is convinced that billions of American tax dollars — money that could better be spent trying to cure Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS — should be squandered dealing with AIDS in Africa, but Obama has already endorsed the U.N.-inspired giveaway known as the Global Poverty Act. It’s estimated that filling this particular Christmas stocking would run us $845 billion. Worse yet, most of this largesse would wind up in the pockets or Swiss bank accounts of those various thugs, such as Omar al-Bashir, Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo, Isayas Afeworki and the aforementioned Robert Mugabe, who run Africa the way that Al Capone ran Chicago.

What Prelutsky rather surprisingly forgets is that America’s political and economic involvement in Africa was never really about the Africans. That is, while a bunch of individuals and NGOs today may be genuinely concerned about the plight of individual citizens in that benighted continent, the West’s support for Africa was simply an outcropping of the Cold War. Once the old Imperialism vanished, Africa was the place of a thousand proxy battles between the Americans and the Soviets. Savvy tinpot tyrants in Africa, freed from the benefits and burdens of their former imperial ties, quickly learned that they could increase the flow of money into their coffers by playing the two Superpowers off against each other.

Even South Africa wasn’t about apartheid as far as the Superpowers were concerned. Instead it was about a West-leaning white government that found itself facing a black opposition that got funding from the Soviets. And before you start thinking that the Soviets funded the blacks because of a principled stand vis a vis apartheid, abandon that thought immediately. The Soviets funded the blacks only because the government, at a political level separate from apartheid, allied itself with the West.

Nowadays, with the face-off being one between Islam and the West, Sudan is exactly the modern South Africa. It’s not the slaughter that’s the problem — sadly, that’s par for the course in Africa — it’s the nature of the hand wielding the machete that’s the problem. You see, this time around it’s not a Communist hand, it’s an Islamic hand. Of course, 30 years ago, America would have done something, not out of any Carter-esque human rights mushiness, but because the Sudan had suddenly become a front in a larger ideological war, not between the Sudanese, but between America and her enemies. Things are different now, when we just stand on the sidelines wringing our hands.

All of which means that our presence in Africa, which looks like a lot of mushy, emotionally driven money, is in fact a Cold War legacy. And it turns out that our presence their may still be necessary as we fight proxy battles against yet another Communist entity — China. You see China is doing a fair bit of meddling in Africa now and, given Africa’s vast natural reserves, it’s not in America’s interests to let that continent drift irrevocably away from the West and land in the Chinese orbit:

Close on the heels of the latest sham election in Zimbabwe, the International Criminal Court announced last week that it is seeking the arrest of the president of Sudan on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. As Africa notches up more failures on the long road out of colonialism, a new pseudo-colonial power–China–is busily engaged in getting exactly what it wants out of the continent. The implications for the kind of political and economic evolution likely to unfold in Africa are significant.

Until about 20 years ago, China’s interest in Africa consisted mainly of encouraging Marxist revolutionary factions. Lately, however, that interest has taken a decidedly economic turn. China is in the market for most of Africa’s products and is selling its own there as well. Once a major oil exporter, China became a net importer of oil in 1993 and is now dependent on imports for half its oil and natural gas. To meet this need, it has diversified its sources, in particular making deals with most of Africa’s oil-producing states.

Just in the past three years, Beijing has signed energy deals with Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, and Sudan. Its investment in Sudan’s pipeline and refinery infrastructure, valued at between $3 billion and $5 billion, is mind-boggling in such a poor country, but it is not unusual for the energy industry. China bought a stake in a Nigerian offshore field two years ago for $2.5 billion and promised to invest the same amount in further exploration and development.

China has huge investments in Algeria, with whose government it is also cooperating on the development of nuclear energy, and Angola, which this spring overtook Nigeria as the continent’s largest producer of oil.

Read more about China and Africa here — and keep in mind that, as has always been the case, while ordinary citizens agitate about Africa because it’s pathetic, governments get involved there because it’s important.